Patricia Highsmith Exhibition of the Swiss National Library 10 March – 10 September 2006

Patricia Highsmith Exhibition of the Swiss National Library 10 March – 10 September 2006 Introduction to the exhibition themes 1. Families, a refuge out of hell 2. Killers and fantasists 3. Morality, normality and oddity 4. On Music 5. Home, sweet home 6. Curious breeders and collectors 7. Society under a microscope 8. Mirror portrait 1. Families, a refuge out of hell Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, where she spent much of her early years, having been put on and off in the good care of her maternal grandmother. Throughout her life, she had a distressing and conflict-ridden relationship with her divorced and remarried mother. Weakened by the separations and disappointed expectations, the daughter struggled to build her love life. She had trouble sharing a house with a lover for more than a few months. Highsmith’s literary output bears testimony to this painful reality, but also to her fierce lucidity. In her writings, the nostalgic desire for an ideal family usually disintegrates before the inexorable collapse of relationships. In an atmosphere of separation, love is but an illusion, a pure projection, often shattered by the reality of the other. From adolescence onward, Patricia Highsmith’s arguments with her mother became near continual. In June 1942, Mary Highsmith slapped her daughter. In response, Highsmith wrote a story in which a girl who is forced to take care of her mother kills her in a fit of laughter, by planting a pair of scissors in her chest. In the 1970s, the family conflict worsened. Highsmith’s mother lost some of her mental faculties and was placed in a nursing home in Fort Worth. During the last twenty years of her mother’s life, Highsmith neither visited her, nor wrote to her. She also renounced her inheritance. Despite the clashes with her mother, Highsmith always remained close to her Texan family, in particular her cousin Dan O. Coates, whom she thought of as a brother. The difficulties and traumas of family life are the subject of several of Highsmith’s novels and short stories. In Edith’s Diary, the female protagonist is weighed down by problems: her apathetic and spineless son disappoints her, and she has to act as a home nurse for her husband’s senile and disabled uncle. To top it all, Edith’s husband moves in with his secretary, leaving her to cope alone. Edith suffers mental disintegration and keeps a diary in which she records the elements of a fantasized life. She imagines herself as a happy grandmother, and also as a mother proud of her son’s brilliant career. The split is playful and innocent at first, but soon drives Edith towards madness and her tragic end. Although Patricia Highsmith showed a certain compassion for Edith, she was pitiless for the father character in People Who Knock on the Door. Richard is a family man who discovers God following a religious experience. He is depicted as a holier-than-thou proselytizing bigot, who tries to talk his son’s girlfriend out of having an abortion. But when a former drug-addicted prostitute—still in danger of falling back into her old ways—becomes pregnant by him, he is faced with his contradictions. It is downhill from there for Richard, in this indictment of right-wing Christian fundamentalism, and in 2 particular the “born again” movement in the United States, which Highsmith researched extensively for the novel. In the short story “The Terrapin”, a matricide is precipitated by the killing of the animal in the title, in preparation for a stew. The young male protagonist originally thinks the terrapin is a present to him from his mother. Horrified by the killing of the shelled reptile, and overwhelmed by resentment, he stabs his mother to death. It is no surprise that the boy enjoys books on psychology, including Karl A. Menninger’s The Human Mind, which Highsmith also read as a child. Her own copy is presented in the exhibition. The short story “The Button” also shows a reparatory murder, although there is no link between the attacker and the victim this time. Roland, the father of a child with Down’s syndrome, is offended by his wife’s regressive behaviour towards their “Mongoloid” son, and repulsed by the eyes which the outside world casts on their trio. One night, he attacks and strangles a total stranger in the street and rips off a button from his jacket. The button, which he keeps from then on in the pocket of whatever trousers he is wearing, takes on multiple meanings, including revenge, reassurance and compensatory secret. 2. Killers and fantasists Patricia Highsmith’s novels depict violent deaths, murders and other crimes. The border between a vague desire to murder and an established crime often fluctuates, as does the relation between claimed and actual guilt. Strangely enough, her protagonists sometimes enact an imaginary murder, as a game, or out of innate curiosity, only to be suspected of having actually committed it later. Other characters remain in the dark about the fate of those they attacked and can, therefore, consider themselves either guilty or innocent, depending on their state of mind. The imagination of Highsmith, who has an unusual gift for plumbing the psyche of criminals and psychopaths, is reflected in these fantastic plots. It is a terrifying world in which a murderer may become the delinquent double of an artist, or may even, at times, be both artist and murderer. At least three of Highsmith’s novels bear the mark of imaginary or uncertain crimes, an innovation in the field of crime literature. In The Blunderer, the corporate lawyer Walter Stackhouse is interested in lopsided friendships, including those between certain murderers and their victims. His sensitivity and interest in criminal affairs have endowed him with intuition. One day he reads a newspaper article on the murder of a woman and soon guesses that the husband is responsible. But when Stackhouse’s own wife commits suicide, his interest in murder and his habit of collecting newspaper articles on the subject make him out as a murderer in the eyes of a brutal police detective. Caught in a spiral, he vainly proclaims his innocence. A Suspension of Mercy (published in the United States as The Story-teller) is a veiled book on the art of writing a good suspense novel. Sydney Bartleby is a frustrated writer, whose novels and television scripts are regularly rejected by editors. He is unhappy in his relationship with his wife and has often imagined killing her. Making allowances for an elderly neighbour, he sets out from his house early one morning, carrying a rolled carpet which he buries in the woods. When his wife fails to return from a stay away, his imaginary enactment of her murder backfires, and everything points to him as a culprit. Unbeknownst to him, Bartleby succeeds where his scripts fail in capturing the attention of an audience. The case is quite different in The Tremor of Forgery, which includes no official accusation, or investigation. One night Howard Ingham hurls his typewriter at the head of a thief to prevent him from entering his bungalow at a Tunisian beach resort. The traces of the incident - bloodstains and the injured or possibly dead burglar - are immediately removed by personnel eager to preserve the reputation of the establishment. Although a prying fellow American urges Ingham to confess and pursue the truth, he must ultimately face his conscience on his own, and chooses to live with the uncertainty that he may have killed a man. 3 3. Morality, normality and oddity In his foreword to the collection of short stories Eleven (1970) Graham Greene wrote that Highsmith’s world is “without moral endings”. Highsmith had addressed the issue four years earlier, in her book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, commenting that Graham Greene “is also a moralist … and I am interested in morality, providing it isn’t preached.” She owned up to a liking for criminal characters, and found “the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial, for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not.” This personal code of ethics asserts itself in the stories, often going against social or religious morals, and legal stipulations. Morality, normality and oddity challenge each other under the puzzled gaze of the reader, fostering an uncertainty and disquiet that carry until the very end of the tale, and beyond. Society’s morals In The Cry of the Owl, society is prompt to accuse, on the basis of his voyeurism, an otherwise rather discreet and harmless man, while it tends to clear characters who appear more “normal”, but are in fact dangerously disturbed and unpredictable. The way in which the story is told encourages the reader to resist the certainties of the majority and to side with the marginalized individual. A criminal society In The Glass Cell, Philip Carter is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. In jail, he changes from martyr to killer, and later murderer: the intolerable miscarriage of justice has thrown a monkey wrench into the system. To survive after his release, the victim must oppose society’s faulty steamroller with his own law. The justice I have received, I shall give back, he thinks to himself. Individual morals Howard Ingham of The Tremor of Forgery builds an ad hoc morality conditioned by his new environment. A human life does not always seem to have the same value in Tunisia as it does in the United States. Which raises the question: Must Ingham confess to the probable, but accidental killing of an Arab thief, which the locals themselves seem to want to keep quiet? Ingham wonders “whether a person makes his own personality and his own standards from within himself, or whether he and the standards are the creation of the society around him.” The debate reaches its peak with the character Tom Ripley, a serene murderer who lives from his crimes with complete impunity.

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